Visiting Manchester the other day, I was driving down a nondescript road past dreary shops and offices when I saw the top of a sports stadium poking into the gray sky. It was Old Trafford. Team buses carrying soccer players from more glamorous cities such as Barcelona have been known to echo with cries of disgust as they pull in here.

The home of Manchester United is rainy and underwhelming. The estimated 333 million humans who consider themselves United fans don’t all know that Manchester is a city in England, but many of those who do would probably be surprised to find just how mid-ranking a city it is. Yet when United’s American ruling family, the Glazers, sold club shares in August, United was valued at $2.3 billion. That made it the world’s most valuable sports franchise, ahead of Real Madrid and baseball’s New York Yankees, according to Forbes. In short, United is bigger than Manchester. So why on earth did this global behemoth arise precisely here? And how, in the last 134 years, has United shaped soccer, in England and now the world?

When a soccer club was created just by the newish railway line in 1878, the Manchester location actually helped. The city was then growing like no other on earth. In 1800 it had been a tranquil little place of 84,000 inhabitants, so insignificant that as late as 1832 it didn’t have a member of parliament. The Industrial Revolution changed everything. Workers poured in from English villages, from Ireland, from feeble economies everywhere (my own great-grandparents arrived on the boat from Lithuania). By 1900, Manchester was Europe’s sixth-biggest city, with 1.25 million inhabitants.

The club by the railway line was initially called Newton Heath, because the players worked at the Newton Heath carriage works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company. They played in work clogs against other work teams. Jim White’s Manchester United: The Biography nicely describes the L&YR workers as “sucked in from all over the country to service the growing need for locomotives and carriages.” Life in Manchester then was neither fun nor healthy, White writes. In some neighborhoods, average male life expectancy was just 17. This was still the same brutal city where a few decades before, Karl Marx’s pal Friedrich Engels had run his father’s factory. The conditions of the industrial city were so awful it inspired communism. (My own great-grandparents lost two of their children to scarlet fever in Manchester before moving on to much healthier southern Africa.)

Inevitably, most of these desperate early Mancunians were rootless migrants. Unmoored in their new home, many embraced the local soccer clubs. Gathering together at Old Trafford must have given these people something of the sense of community that they had previously known in their villages. That’s how the world’s first great industrial city engendered the world’s greatest soccer brand.